I doubt they'd free up the usernames. Username reuse has problems with reputation hijacking, either for paid likes, spam, or making it look like the user said something they didn't. It also creates a bad experience with historic @users in tweets, and no one wants that bad PR tweets pretending to be from someone deceased.
I imagine they want to free up accounts that never did anything. You should be able to safely make a handle available after deleting an account if it has never tweeted, has not been tweeted at, and hasn’t logged in in a long time.
A solution could be to make the usernames available after a random period of time (for up to a year), so popular usernames aren't released all at once to be grabbed by a squatter. With a staggered release this at least allows the chance for someone legitimate to stumble upon the username before a squatter arrives.
If squatting Twitter names becomes even marginally profitable you can be sure that squatters will be setting up bots that will monitor the availability of deactivated usernames that were popular in the past and that as soon as these are released they will be taken. A delay of the kind you suggested will not stop the bot writers.
On the other hand, my username (arp242) is already "squatted" by an account that never tweeted or had any other apparently activity. I don't use Twitter much, but people have erroneously "mentioned" this account on a few occasions.
Wow, this is happening on December 11th? That seems rather abrupt.
Why not freeze and hide the accounts instead of deleting? I.e. don't push any tweets to them, or anything else computationally intensive. Then when they log in again, have them click a button to "catch up." Probably not as profitable as annoying a lot of surprised users who try and log in after Dec 12...
The article explicitly states the goal, which is not to free up handles:
"The site said it [the upcoming deletions] was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies."
Although, to your credit, the handles will indeed become available:
"...previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US."
The evidence suggests that the suspect committed the crime. Oh nevermind, the suspect explicitly stated he did not commit the crime.
I don't even think freeing up usernames is necessarily a bad thing, but trusting the stated motivation of big companies for their actions seems awfully naive.
>>Wow, this is happening on December 11th? That seems rather abrupt.
Just in time for Christmas, image wanting to look back over your deceased father tweets on the holiday only to discover Twitter black-holed them for you...
it never cease to amaze how incompetent management is at Large corporations, it seems the bigger a company gets more incompetent is management becomes
At no point did I say they have a responsibility to archive them for all eternity.
Further giving people 2 weeks of notice over a heavy holiday period were most people are consumed with other activities is not "giving notice"
Further still it is just bad optics, PR is not about legal responsibility, not about technically being right, it is about how it looks to normal everyday people. Moves this like look bad to normal everyday people.
It is moronic to pull a move like this over the year end holidays. They have chosen this because they think it will fly under the radar, that they can do it while everyone is busy with other things. I have a feeling this is going to back fire on them spectacularly
Which is great because personally I think twitter is a net negative for society and its collapse will be good for humanity
The fact that twitter has a size limit of 280 bytes (used to be 140 bytes), they are probably trying to free up some inodes to save some disk space, as greedy as it sounds.
I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive.
WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.
I’m responding to my parent poster who quotes: “In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform.”
I guess it depends on what “don’t do anything” translates to in Twitterspeak.
I do the same with Reddit and HN - I have an account because I'm on the platform, but I rarely comment. This probably won't be a great move for Twitter, especially given how little time they've provided.
> The cull will not affect Twitter's reported user numbers, as the firm bases its usage level only on users who log-in at least once a day. According to its latest earnings report, from September, Twitter has 145m "monetisable" daily active users (users who come into contact with Twitter's advertising on a daily basis).
Seems like they could avoid this problem, keep old accounts, and still free up the namespace by just renaming all these accounts @_archived_originalname (or something better).
Maybe with some kind of process to re-activate the account under the original name (or a new one if it has since been taken). And some kind of hands-on resolution process for people who accidentally got deactivated. Feels tractable.
Citation needed. If they receive a copyright takedown request and don't act on it, then they're liable. Otherwise I don't see where liability comes into play. Please cite court cases showing websites are liable for content posted by its users. Nobody is using Twitter to archive copyrighted material.
>Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto [1]
This is only one example. So many historical figures gone to free up some vanity names.
This is kind of how I use Twitter, lol. I use it as a place to post a random thought, what I'm thinking about, what I'm doing, etc. I don't post much, but I've been trying to get in the habit of posting more.
I worked with a guy who died of a heart attack. Every year LinkedIn asks me to congratulate him having worked X+N years at the company. You have to wonder when they'll give up.
I follow an acquaintance on Twitter who set up an auto-tweet while he was alive. Now, after his death, he still tweets whenever the weather drops below a certain temperature in Scotland.
Now I'm wondering what your acquaintance's tech stack is, and more generally, what the most reliable way to keep running scheduled jobs after death is - since Twitter won't remove accounts that still log in, I kind of want to set up a cronjob to keep my username active for as long as I can. (Assume that the job itself doesn't change, i.e., there's no need to move away from a deprecated API.)
Maybe Lambda + CloudWatch Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades.
Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?
Not sure it would matter if the CC was closed or not. If you're running a Lambda a few times a day you would fall into the free tier for... ever until they change the free tier.
So the question would be does your account stay active despite an expired credit card which is never invoked cos you never put your account into debt?
Some AWS usage is part of the free tier even after 12 months. "The Lambda free tier does not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term, but is available to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely." - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/
I've tried ifttt. The Twitter recipes will stop in a few months for me. Have to go in and turn it in manually every so often. Just trying to repost from Twitter at a location to WordPress. ymmv
There was a case of a military veteran recently in the States who lay dead on his kitchen floor for up to three years. He was still getting some sort of pension/payment and the rent was getting auto-paid from that. They only found him because of a check on tenants in a building/area who weren't drawing any water.
In a case like that, I suppose a debit card or credit card with an automatic transfer would stay active for some time.
There was a building in my city that was constructed in the 70's to be a shopping mall, but the owner got bankrupt in the meanwhile, and the building was repurposed into a parking lot that run for a couple of years.
By 2014 is was imploded. There were around 30 cars still parked there.
Unfortunately, API tokens are not the same as user logins, and very easy to separate out from user activity. Depends on some policy whim to be counted or not as user activity. Not dependable afterlife.
I have a friend who passed away from cancer a few of years ago. I still get these notifications for him. I was trying to call someone recently and my phone suggested my dad who has been gone for a couple of years.
We need a better mechanism to gracefully transition accounts of individuals.
I realize you probably don't want to for personal reasons, but have you removed your father from your phone book?
I didn't remove mine for the longest time, though his number has long been reused by someone else; I only did when I finally got a notice that that person joined Signal and Telegram. Too spooky to see "[your father] has joined Signal!"
LinkedIn has a "report a member as deceased" page that puts the member's account into a commemorative state. Some people might find updates like those to be a painful reminder.
Archive team seems like the appropriate end for these accounts. Maintaining accounts for deceased people for the remainder of the lifespan of the internet is not really a sustainable thing.
To what end? You already assume Twitter has a shorter lifespan than the internet. Are you going to be upset when Twitter dies, removing not just all the accounts of live people, but dead people as well?
Also, Twitter may disagree with you on its lifespan. I wouldn't, but I do believe that unless they do start archiving, it will reduce its lifespan, perhaps considerably.
This is why I really don't like the recent trend of third party sites dynamically embedding tweets on their own page when a screenshot plus direct link could have sufficed. The internet has already lost a great deal of its past with many historical image hosts that went down or rogue (looking at you Photobucket). Why are people making the same mistake again?
BTW Facebook have had the option to memorialize the profile of the deceased for a while. Things seems to have worked out fine for them.
So when twitter changes an API, or is down, and someone happens upon your page they can still see what you intended to include.
Also if you're documenting something like John Smith said "Kill all Muppets, they're taking human jobs" and his publicist goes "John, you really need to delete that tweet" and he does, you can show a screenshot of it to prevent revisionist history.
Yes. And you could even quote the page with all the twitter styling. Ie quote the HTML and CSS instead of just the tweet, if you really want that twitter look and feel.
doesn't the default twitter embed include the original text of the tweet in the embed code, and then just dynamically load in the like/retweet counts and branding?
at least that's the way it looks when they load on a ridiculously slow internet connection, i've never actually looked at the embed code.
The most frustrating case for me is Readability, whcih swapped out the original links to articles with its own link shortener, then went titsup.com
Even migrating those to Pocket (which I hope doesn't do similarly, though it remains all but useless), I've got hundreds of link-shortened articles I need to track down, one by one.
If computational resources keep getting cheaper exponentially (even at a low rate), keeping eg 1 GiB around forever only costs a finite amount of money.
not just the namespace, but the content-space. a service like twitter thives on a feeling if immediacy and involvement, and if you were to constantly be coming across dead accounts (whether the owner is deceased or just otherwise left twitter) i think it would detract from the usefulness of twitter.
whether the accounts are moved to the internet archive or some twitter-hosted archive, the value in twitter is not in old tweets. i think most people would be better off if all of twitter had an automatic expiry.
On a site that only actively presents the newest content, there’s no way you would be constantly coming across dead accounts.
I also find the insinuation that dead users provide no value absurd. Aside from current events, the human condition doesn’t really change, which is why we can still enjoy books written hundreds of years ago.
There is a limit to the cost of computational resources, the cost would decrease until a certain limit and then that cost will apply until the heat death of the universe.
Yes. Though in our case I feel justified in using the simpler model of just assuming exponential shrinkage forever, because I assume that the end of twitter as a company (or the Internet) will happen before the heat death of the universe.
(Similar to how we often treat integers as unit-sized in asymptotic analysis of algorithms, even though we know that we need a logarithmic number of bits for truly large numbers.)
The issue I've seen with archive efforts that end up on the Internet Archive whether by IA via Archive Team is problems with infinite scroll (and other forms of dynamically loading content via JS), at least in my experience. Though I recall one WARC archiving tool that could achieve it (I believe it required the user to manually scroll the page during the capture).
The Internet Archive uses various Web archiving technologies and processes to capture Web-based resources and is working to improve them on an ongoing basis. This includes support for sites/pages that support infinite scroll via JS. If you have specific requests, bug reports, issues, please send them to info@archive.org and we will try to do better.
@aaronsw_hv
12 Sep 2011
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Wow, Newt flipflopped instantaneously on that one. #CNNTeaParty
Yeah really bad that we can't save this shit? Why do you think we should save crap written by dead people? This period will archive so much digital history, it will mostly be considered a joke in the future.
I regularly visit Adam West's feed. I knew Adam and going to see some of his corny posts (like Moose Wayne) are an occasional comfort and not only remind me of him but remind me of watching the tv series as a child with my late father.
Sadly, I've noticed that DMs don't seem to be forever on twitter as all of our private messages to each other are all gone, the bulk were gone before he even passed away.
Given his account is verified I would hope that Twitter keeps that content as long as the service survives, but for those with family and friends that have passed that weren't high profile, they may also take comfort in going through then posts of those accounts and this is kinda blah.
I get it from a cost view, it costs money to keep all of that data but I somewhat feel that a company that has user created content is socially obligated to maintain that content as long as they continue to have that product or until the user wants it removed whichever comes first.
How does one prove a negative? A deleted tweet from 2006 where nobody has taken a screen shot. It's not an active account like POTUS with the entire world watching specifically for catching deletes. I'm seriously asking
I can't provide proof, but I _know_ that I tweeted @adom_dev around the time of it's kickstarter and one of the Baldurs Gate EE devs about gemrb around the time they announced that project.
I can't prove that it was deleted. My first tweet appears to be from 2012 but I joined in April 2007 and definitely tweeted once then. (I was wrong about it being 2006)
I'm pretty sure that I changed my handle at some point. I'll try to remember what it was and search the internet archive.
This overall seems extremely poorly considered. Hopefully, archiving services and efforts are going into overdrive to fix Twitter's errors here.
Allowing hijacking of old, valuable historical Tweets makes no sense — even if it would be nice on some level to reclaim the handles. It may not be worth it.
We should really get about replacing it. How's Mastodon holding up? I could never get over the ridiculous name or "toots", but if it scales we should really be using it instead.
Another thing that shocks me is that ads actually pay for Twitter. How did they build such a massive company (expensive employees and outsized market cap) on ad revenue? It seems like the wrong demographics for ads to actually work and persuade people into buying. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes ground zero for the advertising bubble to burst.
Mastodon is holding up just fine and growing rapidly, the atmosphere is much nicer and every few weeks, there's a massive influx of new users whenever Twitter is upsetting its user base.
The Fediverse (which Mastodon is just one particular implementation of) is shockingly healthy right now. I surmise that it will look quite a bit different once you have, oh, a bbc.com implementing its underlying protocol and pumping out content onto it. At that point who knows what'll happen.
Mastodon itself as a service and protocol, is pretty wonderful.
But in terms of namespace, domain-name, and instance issues, you've got pretty much all your traditional Internet concerns, with a few new twists added.
My first primary instance has gone the way of the dodo, and its domain is now parked somewhere entirely different (https://mammouth.cafe). Numerous other instances have also come and gone.
My current instance, run initially by an anonymous administrator, was transferred to a Japanese concern, who don't do much to keep anyone advised of service outages or their causes/resolution. This is an instance with 56k registered users, large by Mastodon standards.
Then there are the issues with blocking and federation, which don't immediately concern namespace, but could as blocked instances die, and potentially others occupy their namespace, or they change their identity to evade blocks.
There's been a lot of agitation over the dot-org PIR self-dealing and corruption, as that's a fairly commonly-used TLD, either directly by instances or for related resources. The whole DNS / registry system is a bit of a mess.
The fact that between the Internet and DNS there's no real allowance made for either space or time is becoming an increasing stress point. What solutions might exist isn't clear, but assumptions of the 1970s and 1980s are not being sustained 30-40 years later.
As I've noted a few times recently, a dictionary bibliographic entry typically consists of little more than name, dates, nationality, and profession. Webster's 11 Collegiate includes some 6,000 or so such entries. There are roughly 1 million times more people than that now living, and another 100 or 200x more who have ever lived.
In digital systems, there is no distinction between use and mention -- the name is the thing and the thing is the name. This is convenient in narrow scopes (time, place, scale), and ... exceedingly inconvenient over broad scopes (time, place, scale). UUIDs address the collision problem but not the convenience. Convenient shortcuts address convenience, but not uniqueness requirements.
Since meatspace identity is who you are, and other references (names, nicknames, registration numbers, etc.) are not identities but identifiers, the problems aren't as manifest. Your actual identity cannot be merged with another (though numerous related aspects and relations can be). Online, if A and B are suddenly both called "A", then they are both "A".
I think we'll be sorting this out for a while yet.
Are there any Twitter folks here... how can i can access to my 12 year old account? I lost the email its associated with and really would like to regain access!
Has anyone been able to recover their account that was in this state?
I wish they would clean up the honeypots that keep adding people. I report and block about a dozen fake accounts that add me with an account created within 30 days.
I know 1 guy who actually fell for a honeypot, even sent her money. Its gotta be profitable for scammers with as bad as its getting.
There is a nonzero chance that various political figures will have their handles 'accidentally' deactivated and inserted into the available pool. An enterprising body should set some bots up right now just in case there's lulz to be had.
Should also have a tweet lined up, in case they catch their mistake fast. Something like 'we're nuking wales tmr'.
CCPA is probably at least part of the reason behind this. It takes effect on Jan 1. The article mentions users not being about to accept their privacy policy.
While talking with my parents I realized how little of their generation is available to us. What did they eat in there travels? Where? What music did they listen to? What kind of cloths did they wear? I have a few fragments of photos, anecdots and not much more. I was thinking about how highly detailed memories of our generation would be available to future generations. Facebook, Twitter etc are in a way digital monuments of our entire generation. Looking at these misguided arbitrary corporate decisions of culling data isn't comforting. Archive.org is trying to do its best but there needs be better efforts in preserving memories of who passed away and we need to be more sensitive about that even though they are going to produce ad click revenues.
Have you tried reading a book? I don't see how an old facebook timeline is going to provide a lot of insight about a culture in the past compared to what we already do with books and to some extent movies.
There was a HN thread about an open source Twitter implemented in Haskell with the full stack in one page (it's called something specific) and that made me think that maybe decentrialisation is really just having decentrialised habits.
If you can figure out storage, the rest is all just done on the client side. It would kind of be like a exodus back to 1997, when everyone just slapped together some HTML and had a web page (I think; back then I was playing SC2 and didn't know what HTML was).
I thought of this example yesterday: Often people lament something like "the master craftsmen are all old, what would happen in the next generation". But I think the next generation is busy inventing the craft independently. Much like leathercraft or book binding on Reddit. I do think people can get lazy because of YouTwitFace. But I do think that a lazy person can become very efficient and prolific precisely because of revolt against their self-imposed boredom.
It does not require a lot of people (e.g.: archive.org) to make a rather large difference. GNU/Linux and the rest are examples of that 90% viewers/lurkers, 9% interaction, 1% creators. I don't know if I am misquoting that, but maybe people should be active in choosing what they preserve. That is, you are your own 100%; there is no 90-9-1 with regards to your legacy. You have to store it yourself.
That hit me recently - was sat in an airport the other side of the world having just sent my mum a WhatsApp saying we were through security and sharing some snaps from that leg of the journey.
Even within my lifetime, that'd have been a £10 phonecall and a postcard that might or might not arrive in a week or so. It took 20 seconds to have an immediate, searchable, chronological update on what we'd done and where we were. Incredible.
That being said, if Google Photos and WhatsApp go the way of the dodo, we're a bit screwed.
I have the opposite opinion on culling the data. This "preserve everything" attitude just smells like digital hoarding to me. Especially in the context of Twitter, which is mostly the noise with rare blips of the signal. And even in those cases the signal often is very specific to that moment in time and not that important later. The vision of a huge pile of digital trash with a few gold nuggets inside has zero appeal to me.
My wife has started making photobooks of significant family events, having observed that having an arbitrarily large pile of digital photos that never get curated or culled actually means we're less likely to revisit our past.
In April of 2011 I made a twitter account to post wherever I had updates to post on a certain subject. I haven't had updates to post in a few years on that subject (I last posted in 2017) but I don't think I should have my account culled.
EDIT: And it doesn't even make any sense. It's a publishing platform. The author already agreed to anything necessary.
This is actually useful for me. The name of my new company is taken by a 10 year old account that has never tweeted, and I haven’t managed to find somebody at Twitter who can get the name for me.
Does anybody know what’s going to happen to the names? Are they going to become available to register on 11th Dec? I hope somebody isn’t waiting there with a dictionary to squat them all...
> previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US.
Yeah honestly I understand all of the negative effects people are saying but I’ll be so glad if the username I want is released from the user that signed up, tweeted once, got hit by a spam virus in 2011, never tweeted again.
I’ve even got a few reminders in my calendar to check on the username availability on the 11th and 12th. Really hoping it’s a full on user delete rather than just making them inactive
Conversely, it's problematic for me - my Twitter account is up for grabs and someone might impersonate me, assisted by several mentions of the account on old pages.
Yeah, seems like they have a habit of suspending accounts and asking for numbers. I've been lucky until now.
Seems like you can contact support to get it active again without having to give out your phone, but I understand if you'd rather not use the platform at all.
I worked at Twitter back in the early days. I left because I had an inkling there were tons of fake accounts and bot accounts. I thought at some point this would nosedive the company because Facebook’s growth at the time was all about how many active users they had. Twitter seemed to have too many accounts that weren’t justifiably real.
A few years later I Had conversation at another job with coworkers and told them how easy it was to fake followers with $40. Sure enough I found a site that promised a certain amount of followers for $40. I paid the $40 and went from a couple dozen followers to 4,000 over the course of a few days. I think for an extra $60 I could have them retweet something for me as well. At that point I knew my suspicions were correct and knew I made the right choice to leave.
I always wondered why doesn't Twitter do this to purge those bot accounts. They can even do a money-back request to the payment processor afterwards as the service is breaking laws.
So you left Twitter 5+ years ago expecting them to soon fail, and you feel vindicated by the very-much-still-existing Twitter of today purging some accounts?
In a sense, yes. When I was there the company had a ton of other issues too. Mostly how to monetize the service. They couldn’t figure out how to make money, but they were spending money like they were Facebook.
Facebook at least had ad revenue. Twitter really couldn’t figure out how to sell ads.
The concern was to me, fake accounts and fake retweets/followers creating fake user growth. That’s purely my perspective and likely not how the company saw it. I wasn’t comfortable investing my time into a place that gave me that feeling.
If the goal is to make follower counts more accurate, why not just clear the old accounts' follows? That would dodge the many issues with this that people are pointing out.
I hope Facebook does the same thing at least for deleted users. I’ve deleted my FB account for ages and I still receive emails from FB asking me to go back while I’m not subscribed to any email notification from FB.
I find it interesting that what Twitter is doing here would have been absolute standard procedure in any small forum 10 years ago - yet everyone seems to panic when Twitter does it.
I think the reaction shows how much the internet has changed - and, to be honest - how much the tech crowd has been seduced by the idea that all data should be around forever.
I think this is a great descision by Twitter in terms of user privacy.
The difference being that content posted to forum from a deleted account is still accessible unless explicitly removed - just marked as from deleted user, while Twitter feed or post is not.
There are so many now deceased person's account which contains very interesting, and are definitely considered as an important historical material. These historical materials will be lost on this move.
Yes, we can't expect the for-profit companies to preserve the history. But these are so hard to preserve.
I'm wondering about those users who are under govt clamped internet shutdown since months and were not able to login since months e.g. Kashmir (Indian Administered) where internet shutdown is continuing since Aug 5 2019?
265 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadFTA- "previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off"
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/how-i...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/twitt...
Amazing if Twitter is just going to release valuable namespaces worth millions all on the same day.
Eg https://fiscal.treasury.gov/public/gifts-to-government.html
Why not freeze and hide the accounts instead of deleting? I.e. don't push any tweets to them, or anything else computationally intensive. Then when they log in again, have them click a button to "catch up." Probably not as profitable as annoying a lot of surprised users who try and log in after Dec 12...
"The site said it [the upcoming deletions] was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies."
Although, to your credit, the handles will indeed become available:
"...previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off - though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US."
I don't even think freeing up usernames is necessarily a bad thing, but trusting the stated motivation of big companies for their actions seems awfully naive.
Just in time for Christmas, image wanting to look back over your deceased father tweets on the holiday only to discover Twitter black-holed them for you...
it never cease to amaze how incompetent management is at Large corporations, it seems the bigger a company gets more incompetent is management becomes
It is not Twitter’s responsibility to archive for all eternity.
At no point did I say they have a responsibility to archive them for all eternity.
Further giving people 2 weeks of notice over a heavy holiday period were most people are consumed with other activities is not "giving notice"
Further still it is just bad optics, PR is not about legal responsibility, not about technically being right, it is about how it looks to normal everyday people. Moves this like look bad to normal everyday people.
It is moronic to pull a move like this over the year end holidays. They have chosen this because they think it will fly under the radar, that they can do it while everyone is busy with other things. I have a feeling this is going to back fire on them spectacularly
Which is great because personally I think twitter is a net negative for society and its collapse will be good for humanity
Storing each tweet as one file might even make sense. But you need to pick a filesystem that supports that use case at scale, if you are twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir is a good example of how this can make sense---at least at a small local scale.
Yes, Twitter is going to purge a lot of accounts, the same accounts Twitter boasted about having pre IPO in order to fake growth.
I have an account. I log in but I never post. I only use it to follow some interesting accounts —that is all. I don’t contact customer service i don’t feign outrage I don’t virtue signal I don’t post memes... it’s by all means passive.
WTF, I just want to follow some accounts which disseminate useful information.
I guess it depends on what “don’t do anything” translates to in Twitterspeak.
Indeed, your tweets die with you. I wonder about really popular personalities?
Maybe someone will make a tweet in peace site.
> The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died - unless someone with that person's account details is able to log-in.
Yeah, this is bad.
EDIT
----
Archive Team is making an effort to archive twitter accounts of dead users. Please see these links:
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1199459588594176000
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbCbDZEPfxPCqOLRvo...
https://www.archiveteam.org/
Maybe with some kind of process to re-activate the account under the original name (or a new one if it has since been taken). And some kind of hands-on resolution process for people who accidentally got deactivated. Feels tractable.
> The site said it was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies.
That’s a lot of potential digital content that will go dark.
This is the exact purpose of Section 230 and why it is so important to preserve it.
https://twitter.com/flurdy/status/1199290001143582721
My first thought was Hal Finney, whose account I occasionally browse for a reminder of what twitter was like 10 years ago.
https://twitter.com/halfin
>Harold Thomas Finney II (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto [1]
This is only one example. So many historical figures gone to free up some vanity names.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...
"Just back from walking the dogs"
"Running bitcoin"
Maybe Lambda + CloudWatch Events? AWS probably won't go away for decades.
Does your credit card automatically close when your death is reported to the financial system, or can you direct it to stay open in your will + set aside a bit of money to pay off the couple-cent bill in perpetuity?
So the question would be does your account stay active despite an expired credit card which is never invoked cos you never put your account into debt?
Just like twitters in this instance.
So if you fell under the free tier then I'm curious if it would continue to run indefinitely.
In a case like that, I suppose a debit card or credit card with an automatic transfer would stay active for some time.
Wow. Some leaky faucets or automatic plant watering system would have kept him undiscovered for even longer.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/10/29/inenglish/1572340728_79...
By 2014 is was imploded. There were around 30 cars still parked there.
https://www.thelocal.se/20191119/man-found-dead-in-stockholm...
I didn't remove mine for the longest time, though his number has long been reused by someone else; I only did when I finally got a notice that that person joined Signal and Telegram. Too spooky to see "[your father] has joined Signal!"
Also, Twitter may disagree with you on its lifespan. I wouldn't, but I do believe that unless they do start archiving, it will reduce its lifespan, perhaps considerably.
BTW Facebook have had the option to memorialize the profile of the deceased for a while. Things seems to have worked out fine for them.
Tweets are text, so quote them as text?
Also if you're documenting something like John Smith said "Kill all Muppets, they're taking human jobs" and his publicist goes "John, you really need to delete that tweet" and he does, you can show a screenshot of it to prevent revisionist history.
at least that's the way it looks when they load on a ridiculously slow internet connection, i've never actually looked at the embed code.
Even migrating those to Pocket (which I hope doesn't do similarly, though it remains all but useless), I've got hundreds of link-shortened articles I need to track down, one by one.
If computational resources keep getting cheaper exponentially (even at a low rate), keeping eg 1 GiB around forever only costs a finite amount of money.
whether the accounts are moved to the internet archive or some twitter-hosted archive, the value in twitter is not in old tweets. i think most people would be better off if all of twitter had an automatic expiry.
I also find the insinuation that dead users provide no value absurd. Aside from current events, the human condition doesn’t really change, which is why we can still enjoy books written hundreds of years ago.
(Similar to how we often treat integers as unit-sized in asymptotic analysis of algorithms, even though we know that we need a logarithmic number of bits for truly large numbers.)
@aaronsw_hv 12 Sep 2011 More Wow, Newt flipflopped instantaneously on that one. #CNNTeaParty
Yeah really bad that we can't save this shit? Why do you think we should save crap written by dead people? This period will archive so much digital history, it will mostly be considered a joke in the future.
Sadly, I've noticed that DMs don't seem to be forever on twitter as all of our private messages to each other are all gone, the bulk were gone before he even passed away.
Given his account is verified I would hope that Twitter keeps that content as long as the service survives, but for those with family and friends that have passed that weren't high profile, they may also take comfort in going through then posts of those accounts and this is kinda blah.
I get it from a cost view, it costs money to keep all of that data but I somewhat feel that a company that has user created content is socially obligated to maintain that content as long as they continue to have that product or until the user wants it removed whichever comes first.
It's gone now.
Both tweets are gone.
The "Tweets & replies" section of your profile (https://twitter.com/eggsome/with_replies ) has two tweets that seem to match your description:
https://twitter.com/eggsome/status/228459378859180032
https://twitter.com/eggsome/status/189888249500680192
I'm pretty sure that I changed my handle at some point. I'll try to remember what it was and search the internet archive.
It seems that deleting any old data is a negative for the company. Data is the new oil, right.
They may have had an accidental data loss. But more likely it is data that is rarely read so not stored in a hot cache near your edge.
Allowing hijacking of old, valuable historical Tweets makes no sense — even if it would be nice on some level to reclaim the handles. It may not be worth it.
Another thing that shocks me is that ads actually pay for Twitter. How did they build such a massive company (expensive employees and outsized market cap) on ad revenue? It seems like the wrong demographics for ads to actually work and persuade people into buying. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter becomes ground zero for the advertising bubble to burst.
The advertising bubble will burst.
I hope this never happens. It's rare that something doesn't become worse when it becomes mainstream online.
But in terms of namespace, domain-name, and instance issues, you've got pretty much all your traditional Internet concerns, with a few new twists added.
My first primary instance has gone the way of the dodo, and its domain is now parked somewhere entirely different (https://mammouth.cafe). Numerous other instances have also come and gone.
My current instance, run initially by an anonymous administrator, was transferred to a Japanese concern, who don't do much to keep anyone advised of service outages or their causes/resolution. This is an instance with 56k registered users, large by Mastodon standards.
Then there are the issues with blocking and federation, which don't immediately concern namespace, but could as blocked instances die, and potentially others occupy their namespace, or they change their identity to evade blocks.
There's been a lot of agitation over the dot-org PIR self-dealing and corruption, as that's a fairly commonly-used TLD, either directly by instances or for related resources. The whole DNS / registry system is a bit of a mess.
The fact that between the Internet and DNS there's no real allowance made for either space or time is becoming an increasing stress point. What solutions might exist isn't clear, but assumptions of the 1970s and 1980s are not being sustained 30-40 years later.
As I've noted a few times recently, a dictionary bibliographic entry typically consists of little more than name, dates, nationality, and profession. Webster's 11 Collegiate includes some 6,000 or so such entries. There are roughly 1 million times more people than that now living, and another 100 or 200x more who have ever lived.
In digital systems, there is no distinction between use and mention -- the name is the thing and the thing is the name. This is convenient in narrow scopes (time, place, scale), and ... exceedingly inconvenient over broad scopes (time, place, scale). UUIDs address the collision problem but not the convenience. Convenient shortcuts address convenience, but not uniqueness requirements.
Since meatspace identity is who you are, and other references (names, nicknames, registration numbers, etc.) are not identities but identifiers, the problems aren't as manifest. Your actual identity cannot be merged with another (though numerous related aspects and relations can be). Online, if A and B are suddenly both called "A", then they are both "A".
I think we'll be sorting this out for a while yet.
Has anyone been able to recover their account that was in this state?
I actually just gained access to that email and unfortunately since I only used it once years ago it was wiped.
Darn, I hope they don't wipe my account... there is no support .. premium support even as Id pay to have access and use it again.
I know 1 guy who actually fell for a honeypot, even sent her money. Its gotta be profitable for scammers with as bad as its getting.
Should also have a tweet lined up, in case they catch their mistake fast. Something like 'we're nuking wales tmr'.
There was a HN thread about an open source Twitter implemented in Haskell with the full stack in one page (it's called something specific) and that made me think that maybe decentrialisation is really just having decentrialised habits.
If you can figure out storage, the rest is all just done on the client side. It would kind of be like a exodus back to 1997, when everyone just slapped together some HTML and had a web page (I think; back then I was playing SC2 and didn't know what HTML was).
I thought of this example yesterday: Often people lament something like "the master craftsmen are all old, what would happen in the next generation". But I think the next generation is busy inventing the craft independently. Much like leathercraft or book binding on Reddit. I do think people can get lazy because of YouTwitFace. But I do think that a lazy person can become very efficient and prolific precisely because of revolt against their self-imposed boredom.
It does not require a lot of people (e.g.: archive.org) to make a rather large difference. GNU/Linux and the rest are examples of that 90% viewers/lurkers, 9% interaction, 1% creators. I don't know if I am misquoting that, but maybe people should be active in choosing what they preserve. That is, you are your own 100%; there is no 90-9-1 with regards to your legacy. You have to store it yourself.
It downloads your digital life and stores it locally on a single, unified timeline, for archival and family history purposes.
Even within my lifetime, that'd have been a £10 phonecall and a postcard that might or might not arrive in a week or so. It took 20 seconds to have an immediate, searchable, chronological update on what we'd done and where we were. Incredible.
That being said, if Google Photos and WhatsApp go the way of the dodo, we're a bit screwed.
EDIT: And it doesn't even make any sense. It's a publishing platform. The author already agreed to anything necessary.
Does anybody know what’s going to happen to the names? Are they going to become available to register on 11th Dec? I hope somebody isn’t waiting there with a dictionary to squat them all...
Does anyone know of a service that can be made to automatically pick up a Twitter name as it becomes available?
I’ve even got a few reminders in my calendar to check on the username availability on the 11th and 12th. Really hoping it’s a full on user delete rather than just making them inactive
Seems like you can contact support to get it active again without having to give out your phone, but I understand if you'd rather not use the platform at all.
There's zero downside to releasing those, since their old tweets are already gone.
A few years later I Had conversation at another job with coworkers and told them how easy it was to fake followers with $40. Sure enough I found a site that promised a certain amount of followers for $40. I paid the $40 and went from a couple dozen followers to 4,000 over the course of a few days. I think for an extra $60 I could have them retweet something for me as well. At that point I knew my suspicions were correct and knew I made the right choice to leave.
Facebook at least had ad revenue. Twitter really couldn’t figure out how to sell ads.
The concern was to me, fake accounts and fake retweets/followers creating fake user growth. That’s purely my perspective and likely not how the company saw it. I wasn’t comfortable investing my time into a place that gave me that feeling.
I think the reaction shows how much the internet has changed - and, to be honest - how much the tech crowd has been seduced by the idea that all data should be around forever.
I think this is a great descision by Twitter in terms of user privacy.
Yes, we can't expect the for-profit companies to preserve the history. But these are so hard to preserve.